I received an invitation via a link on my Facebook main page to test out Facebook Lite, Facebook’s latest strip down version of Facebook, aimed at users with a slower internet connection or those who are accessing Facebook on their mobile phones.

Apparently, most of the countries selected to test Facebook Lite are in Asia, including China and Russia. According to Facebook, we may have a slower connection but this is where Facebook is rapidly growing so they are making our user experience better.

So I clicked on the link to Facebook Lite at http://lite.facebook.com but unfortunately, no matter how I clicked, even opening a new browser, failed to show me this stripped down version. I was redirected to the main Facebook page all the time.

Well, either my connection was not slow enough for Facebook Lite (LOL) or Facebook Lite wasn’t ready for us yet, but then again, why did I, and I am sure many other Facebook users as well, receive that invitation to try it out?

In my previous post, I wrote about the inaccessibility of Twitter and LiveJournal for a few hours and the slow websites including Facebook. Of course, when it was happening, my friends and I were in the dark but we jokingly bet that MySpace would be the next target.

Now, we are clearer that the hackers from Russia were targeting this guy who went by the online handle of Cyxymu, Cyrillic spelling of Sukhumi. Sukhumi is a city of Abkhazia in Georgia, which is at war with Russia. This guy, Cyxymu, was using all these social websites and blogs to propagate his pro-Georgia messages against Russia, which caused this cyber war from Russia.

Twitter has issued an announcement that they will try to keep the website up and accessible for everyone amidst these DOS attacks but there would be no guarantee as long as Russia does not stop their attacks.

Like one journalist wrote, it is just silly to target these social sites. He likens it to bombing a TV station just because they are broadcasting news that are against our ideology, etc. Let’s just see how this issue will develop, though it serves as a good test for engineers in Twitter, LiveJournal and Facebook.

As this time of writing, half the internet seems to be down. I can’t tell how many sites are affected but those that I use chronically, namely Facebook and Twitter, are either down or crawling at snail’s pace.

At this point, we have no information what is happening but for my friends and I who plays non-stop on Facebook, this is “killing” us. We want to send tweets out to air our frustrations but we are unable too.

How funny. Has something like this happened before? Many of us thought that it was our broadband companies that are acting up. I wonder how many calls they received because we could not access Twitter and Facebook. LOL Luckily I held my horses.

After about an hour plus, both sites, and Live Journal, which was also down earlier, are back up and running smoothly again. Thankfully! Now, let’s go back to those games. Hahaha!

Although t first I was pretty reluctant to play games on Facebook because I as afraid I would get addicted to them and then waste a lot of time playing games and being non productive, I guess there is no escaping them when everyone I know is playing one game or another, or even multiple games on Facebook.

I have been spending at least the past five months playing games on Facebook. I started with one game, playing it daily, but now, I play at least six games on a daily basis, and a multitude of other games when I have the time.

I play Mafia Wars, Restaurant City, Pet Society, Glamour Age, Sorority Life, Mobwars, Street Racing and Underworld daily and I am not alone. It’s weird how the news feed has been taken over by post after post from one game application after another and even when people actually WRITE a status message, it is usually game related. It is difficult to find a REAL status message anymore.

Social games are such that the larger group friends we have playing the same game, the stronger we are in the game. This is true for so many games on Facebook (and MySpace) that we have to continuously grow our Mafia Family, our crew, our House and what not, so much so that we add people as friends even though we do not know them, except that they share a similar interest in the game.

I have to admit that after playing Mafia Wars, I have added a slew of people as friends too just to have more people in my “team”. I am wondering what to do with these people should I stop playing these games as actively I am doing right now. Maybe I would just delete them all. What do you do?

After such long years sticking to Internet Explorer and unwilling to switch to Firefox, I have finally succumbed.

No, it is not because I think that Firefox is better than Internet Explorer NOW, but it is because after changing to a new hard disk drive and installing a new copy of Windows XP, Facebook no longer display well on my Internet Explorer. I tried changing different configurations but it is still the same with an error message at the lower left corner of my status bar.

Well, despite being Pinked by Facebook a couple of days ago, I still spend a lot of time there playing games and with this new copy of Internet Explorer, not only does Facebook not display well, the games also have problems loading. That’s why I am forced to change to Firefox so that I could continue playing Mafia Wars, Restaurant City, Pet Society, Glamour Age, Sorority Life, Underworld and Street Racing. Yes, these are all the Facebook games that I play daily. Now that I have gotten them listed out, no wonder I feel as if I am hopping from one game to another THE WHOLE DAY!

Although now that Firefox 3.5.1 is my default browser, I still have a couple of issues to pick with it but that would probably be another post for another day.

My aunt, who is not web savvy, told me that she heard from friends that one could get freebies on the web. I have been using the internet for a long time and I have seen companies that offer freebies (or even money) online come and go, so I told her not to listen to such things because there’s no free lunch in this world.

However, lately, it seems to be the trend to complete offers for freebies and one could easily sign up with partnering companies that offer freebies, and then cancel the subscription before one gets charged. I have heard bad but equally good experiences from friends who participated in such programs though I never tried it before but I think it all boils down to how diligent one is in keeping tabs of dates!

This evening, I got to know of this freebie network called Free4Me which boasts that we could get whatever we want for free. I have to say there is not much information available on the website unless we sign up with our email address. I reckon this is also one of those trial or referral sites but it sure is very tempting with its promise about getting whatever we want, for free, especially consumer electronics!

A few days ago, the hard disk of my computer broke down and because there was an issue with the Windows OS where I would have to buy a new one because the one I have was used in another system already, I thought I wanted to change to an open source operating system, like Linux. It’s the most popular open source OS, after all.

The reason I wanted to do that was because of economics, of course. I don’t see a reason why I should pay more than MYR300 for a single license OS. Certainly, MYR30 would be more than enough already!

So I was weighing my options and I asked a friend’s opinion. He said I could definitely do that if only I was willing to relearn the whole works because Linux is just so different from Microsoft Windows. It would be an entirely new ball game and I certainly do not have the time to mess in uncharted territory.

In addition, my friend said that there would be many common programs that I am currently using that would be incompatible with Linux. Eekkk!!! In conclusion, according to my friend, freebies may not be good. And good stuff definitely don’t come cheap!